Economics · 8 modules · 20 steps
Economics: The Great Ideas
An economics education built from arguments rather than textbooks. It runs from Smith and the classical tradition through the critics who rejected it, Keynes and the crises, development and inequality, and the behavioural work that showed people do not decide the way the models assumed. Heterodox economists are read as central rather than optional, and four survey textbooks that nobody self-studying ever finishes have been removed. The promise is that you will read an economic claim in a newspaper and know what would have to be true for it to hold.
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Thinking Like an Economist
Economics is a way of asking questions before it is a set of answers. Two writers who show you the method, and disagree with each other about almost everything else.
The Undercover Economist
Tim HarfordHarford explains rents, scarcity power and externalities using a coffee shop and a supermarket. The gentlest possible way in.
Open the core textTwo economists on the single idea the whole subject is built from.
Open companionEconomics: The User's Guide
Ha-Joon ChangChang's argument is that there is no single economics, but nine schools that disagree, and that being told otherwise is itself a political act.
The schools Chang describes, laid out so you can see where each one starts from.
Open companionThe Classical Arguments
Where the subject comes from. Read Smith for what he actually said rather than what he is quoted as saying, then get the whole nineteenth-century argument in one book.
The Wealth of Nations
Adam SmithRead the first two books and the passages on the division of labour. Smith is far more sceptical about merchants than his reputation suggests.
Open the core textA professor's lecture on what Smith argued, including the parts usually left out of the quotations.
Open companionThe Worldly Philosophers
Robert HeilbronerThe lives and arguments of the major economists from Smith to Schumpeter, written as intellectual biography. Still the best narrative introduction.
The same cast of characters at speed, useful as a map before you read the book.
Open companionThe Critics of Orthodoxy
Two economists who rejected the foundations rather than the conclusions. Robinson on what capital even is, Polanyi on whether a self-regulating market ever existed.
Economic Philosophy
Joan RobinsonRobinson takes apart the ideological assumptions buried inside supposedly technical economics. She was at the centre of the Cambridge capital controversy and never got the Nobel.
A full lecture from her own college on what she argued and why it was inconvenient.
Open companionThe Great Transformation
Karl PolanyiPolanyi's claim is that the self-regulating market was not a natural development but a political project, and that societies resist being turned into markets.
Open the core textA short summary of the double movement, which is the book's central idea.
Open companionMoney, Booms and Busts
What happens when the economy stops working, and the three arguments about what to do. Keynes wrote in one depression, Kindleberger catalogued the pattern, Kelton argues the constraint was never what we thought.
Keynes: The Return of the Master
Robert SkidelskyKeynes's biographer explains the General Theory without the mathematics, and argues it was misread almost immediately.
The mechanics of aggregate demand, which is the part the book assumes you already have.
Open companionManias, Panics, and Crashes
Charles KindlebergerA financial history of bubbles from tulips onward, showing the same sequence every time. The pattern is the argument.
The stages of a bubble, illustrated with the episodes Kindleberger catalogues.
Open companionThe Deficit Myth
Stephanie KeltonThe Modern Monetary Theory case that a currency-issuing government is not constrained like a household. Contested, and worth understanding before you accept or reject it.
Kelton making the argument herself in fourteen minutes.
Open companionGrowth and Development
Why some countries are rich. Three answers: institutions, evidence from field experiments, and a long view of health and income together.
Why Nations Fail
Daron Acemoglu and James RobinsonThe institutional argument, that inclusive political institutions produce prosperity and extractive ones do not, run across five centuries of examples.
Open the core textJames Robinson presenting the thesis and the objections to it.
Open companionPoor Economics
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther DufloWhat the poor actually do with money, established by randomised trials rather than assumption. It won its authors the Nobel and changed how aid is designed.
Open the core textThe method explained, which is what the book is really about.
Open companionThe Great Escape
Angus DeatonHealth and wealth over 250 years, and Deaton's uncomfortable argument that the same processes that produced escape also produced the gaps.
Deaton presenting the book at Princeton.
Open companionCommons, Institutions and the State
Three books against the assumption that there are only two ways to organise anything. Ostrom found a third, Mazzucato asks who really creates value, Rodrik shows you cannot have everything at once.
Governing the Commons
Elinor OstromOstrom showed by fieldwork that communities manage shared resources without either privatisation or state control. The first woman to win the economics Nobel.
An economist explaining the design principles Ostrom extracted from real commons.
Open companionThe Value of Everything
Mariana MazzucatoMazzucato's argument that modern economics cannot distinguish creating value from extracting it, and that this is why finance looks so productive.
Mazzucato making the distinction herself.
Open companionThe Globalization Paradox
Dani RodrikYou can have deep globalisation, national sovereignty and democracy, but only two at a time. Once you see the trilemma you cannot unsee it.
Rodrik stating the trilemma in under five minutes.
Open companionInequality
Two books on distribution, one global and statistical, one about a single country where the gap between growth and human development is starkest.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas PikettyTwo centuries of tax records behind one claim: when the return on capital exceeds growth, inherited wealth compounds faster than earned income.
Open the core textPiketty presenting the argument and the data behind it.
Open companionAn Uncertain Glory
Jean Dreze and Amartya SenIndia as the case study: rapid growth alongside health and education outcomes worse than much poorer countries. The gap is the subject.
Sen's capability framework, which is the lens the book uses throughout.
Open companionHow People Actually Decide
The behavioural correction. Three books on the gap between the rational agent in the models and the person doing the deciding.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel KahnemanThe two-system account of judgement, from the psychologist who won the economics Nobel for showing the standard model was wrong about people.
Open the core textKahneman explaining the distinction in his own words.
Open companionMisbehaving
Richard ThalerThe story of how behavioural economics was forced into the discipline, told by the man who did most of the forcing. Funnier than it sounds.
Open the core textThaler on choice architecture, the idea that came out of all this.
Open companionScarcity
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar ShafirScarcity of anything, money or time, consumes mental bandwidth and makes people worse at decisions. It reframes poverty as a cognitive tax rather than a character flaw.
The bandwidth argument in short form. The weakest companion in this pathway and worth replacing if a better one appears.
Open companion